When setting out to create an online presence in a form of a website there’re a few things to consider. Depending on a purpose your website is going to serve you would need to decide whether you prefer a custom design or a web template to be used as a basis for the website.

Research results show that poor design is the main reason over 90% of users experience distrust to a website. More professionally looking websites are subjectively treated as more credible. A personal website aimed at friends and relatives can be anything, whereas that which showcases your business or professional expertise must be presentable enough to win visitors over.

Each of the two methods of website building, through custom design and using web templates, has its advantages and disadvantages, so these are what we will review hereafter.

Custom Design Pros

1. Uniqueness

Your website will stand out in a see of other websites not least because of company branding.

2. Scalability

The website code can be purposely accommodated for future changes of the design.

3. Control over the process and result

The web designer or a team of such doing the job will create a website according to a plan, in a style, layout and a structure to the specifications and requirements of a client.

Custom Design Cons

1. Time

Since custom design means building a website from scratch, the time needed for its completion is considerably longer. Search for the right web designer could also be time consuming.

2. Know-how

To be able to build a website from scratch one must be an expert in coding and web design, a quality not everybody posesses. Lack of expertise bring us to the next point…

3. Costs

If the job of web design is farmed out to professional web designers, the budget of the project must be quite high due to costliness of their services.

Web Template Pros

1. Costs

The saturated and constantly developing market of web templates offers tens of thousands of low price and even free items at a decent quality.

2. Time efficiency

Although initially some time may be spent on selecting a suitable template, once you have it, if it’s not your aim to redesign, improve and personalize the ready made layout of a template, your website can be launched in a matter of days once being populated with the content.

3. Exchangeability

This is a viable advantage for users of content management systems such as WordPress and Joomla, where design templates are detached from the content and can be switched at will.

Web Template Cons

1. Lack of originality

There’s a good chance of existence of at least another website based on the same template as yours, which may detract from its appeal to a visitor with adverse repercussions towards the image of your business or persona.

2. Structure rigidness

The way a ready made web template is coded may not allow for design expansion or revamp should you have such a need in the future.

The pros and cons of each method are to be understood as their opposites with respect to the other one.

What can also be attributed to advantages of web templates use is the fact that their bundles of a dozen items and more at exceptionally low prices are regurlarly being made available on the market through numerous deals and special offers.

Current overview is dedicated to templates for one of the leaders on the market of open source e-commerce solutions PrestaShop. Its leadership is not least accounted for the great variety of themes available on the market for any taste and type of commerce the store is dealing in. Some of those we included in our review.

Since Magento, an open source ecommerce web application, offers only one stock theme, it is doubtful that it will suit everyone. Not only that each store must have a unique look, different types of commerce inevitably do have their own feel and flavor. An electronic store design will look odd and out of place if applied to clothing store. Therefore template designers cater for different branches of commerce. What’s beautiful about Magento themes in particular is that they can be switched over without affecting the store content, layout or functionality. And as you may see below quite a few of them are responsive.

The following colorful designs are a good way to represent your model agency or fashion magazine on the Web. The templates pack enough feature to accomplish this task. There you will find portfolios, blog sections, submenus, sliders, widgets, contact pages. Coupled with enlarged ‘no frills’ typography and responsiveness they make excellent web facade for any fashion business.

In the present showcase our goal was to present the variety of templates suitable for companies which provide services of different kinds. These templates cover a broad range of fields, starting from plumbing and cleaning and ending with body care and pet care, as well as platforms they’re compliant with.